sometimes journeys defy explanation.
rather, the branching off from a journey
confuses the intimate and public history.
a child plays in the hills; something
makes them wander through runnels where
they find clay pots, old assyrian shards,
or the cave of lascaux. no one knows
what made them do it, or what they
were seeking blindly in the diversion
from play, the journey made
from the back of another one.
the unplanned surprises
the fates weave as they spin
the future of all pasts. a glitch
appears in their spinning,
a bubble in the weave, an abrasion
of colours, which only art can correct.
we call that art destiny surprising us back
in echo response to our unplanned deeds.
take that famous visit to the oracle
of ammon. he’d already exhausted
himself with wars and the vast desert.
he had already pursued the edges
of personal destiny as far as it could go,
extending the limits. But the sands
were writhing with pitiless snakes
and the troops were already famished
with this conquest without
end, till the world runs out.
the persians had been routed; there
was nothing more to win except
rest and the spoils of hard conquest.
but obscure urges dwell in the hearts
of those who toil at world domination.
some say he was perplexed
by the mystery of his origins,
that he sought a father more
elevated than the mortal one,
that baffled by the teeming myths
that sprang up in his body, giving him
no rest, driving him on through numberless
obstacles, that he sought to understand
whether divinity played a part in the strange
shapes that the fates wove in his dreams,
and whispered in his long marches,
his encounters with wandering sages
and pointed through him to the sun.
he abandoned his troops and took
with him few men, and risked death
by thirst and black snakes through
that harsh desert where myths
are ruined or forged. history
relates, with more fact than truth,
that he stationed a garrison at pelusium
and along the eastern nile to heliopolis
traversed the river to memphis.
he’d struck through the burnished desert.
at memphis they crowned him pharoah.
apis received his sacrificial bulls
and the canonic branch of the nile
witnessed his branching off journey
to the fertile oasis in siwah. his greek
sandals trod as far as paraetonium,
in ancient libyia, leaving small footprints
like dead fishes on those salt shores
of dead rivers. what did he seek
in that hallucination, that obscure quest
to the heart of myth? he disappeared
into the temple and only silence
and an unknowable man emerged
from between its tall gates.
not the same man came out as went in
some spoke of a new light on his face.
some spoke of a serenity in his eyes
that had never been there before.
the priests of that temple, where
philosophers came to be raised,
had whispered something magical
into his ears which he hadn’t heard
and in not hearing heard everything
he had ever wanted and sought
in all the disguised battles of his life.
more than all the things we’re told,
the finger pointing to the sun
in him, touched another gold.